Druid Forum (EU) Recap – Method

Good afternoon Druids,

It’s a slow news day and things here in Boston have been hectic to say the least. But in light of the blue posters cryptic comment that changes are coming our way for druids its worth looking at some very well written posts from Method on the EU forums. Please understand english (or proper english grammer and spelling) aren’t always their #1 priority, the message is.

Post #1 by Nagura of Method

Id like to say something to the current restodruid situation too, ill just put it in this thread since i kinda liked your arguments.
Im playing a restodruid in Method and i actually dont like whining on forums, but since it doesnt seem like blizzard wants to change something anytime soon, ill just try.

First of all: Since im playing with probably some of the best healers out there, no one can say the healers in my guild or me are doing something wrong.

So here is my opinion:

Restodruids are just too weak right now. We are a pure healing class (no absorb, no dmg reduction cd or hp increase) but still cant compete on healing with other healing classes. 
But thats not the main issue, the main issue is, every other healing class brings some awesome utility to the raid (aura mastery, disc barrier, hp increase from shamans, slt, strong tank cds like painsup, guardian spirit, live cocoon, revival, manatide, manahymn, all sort of absorbing spells) and restodruids have just nothing like this (ironbark is a nice spell, but just not good enough compared to all the other classes cds).
The only raid cd a restodruid has is tranquility, and a shamans healing tide is healing more + they dont have to channel it for 7 secs and a moonkins tranq with heart of the wild is doing double the healing of a restodruids tranq and even more.

The only thing restodruids are good in right now is tank healing, but since paladins are doing good tank healing too + more raid healing + have aura mastery + hand of purity + hand of protection + absorbs, why bring a restodruid?

There is absolutely no reason to bring a restodruid into the raid, unless your raid needs roar and doesnt have enough moonkins, theres a point in the boss-fight where you need to do burst dmg and restodruids can help with heart of the wild or immunity spells are needed (i rly like symbiosis).

I have to say, im raiding 25 man only, and im pretty sure resto druid is not that bad in 10 man compared to 25 man if it comes to pure healing (aka on healing meters), because reju is by far our best healing spell and the reju uptime on 10 ppl is ofc higher than on 25 ppl and consumes less mana, but since 10 man has limited raid cooldowns because of less players, you obviously dont prefer bringing a restodruid over another class in top pve guilds. 

Conclusion: Restodruid cant compete with other healers in its current state.

Another problem is our gear scaling. In my opinion other healers are scaling way better with gear than restodruids do. Paladin with their mastery ofc, shamans get more spirit = manatide gives more mana, discs get more spirit = get more mana from rapture, and so on.
Restodruids gain mana through innervate, and since the manapool is 300k and doesnt change with gear, we always get the same amount of mana. With more gear we gain more int + more mastery, but it only increases our pure healing and doesnt give us anything else and a LOT of our healing is overheal anyway (thanks to absorbs and smart heals).

Now something about our mushrooms. It was a nice idea and i rly like it because you actually have to think about what youre doing and not only brainless press a button and smartheal ppl, but its rly hard to find a good use for them in most of the fights since players have to constantly move around. I would suggest to give the druid an ability with a cd on it to move all 3 of the mushrooms to another spot (with their current absorbed reju heal), just like shamans can move their totems. Or let us just place the shrooms one by one on another place while keeping the already absorbed reju overhealing.
Also mushrooms are currently healing pets too. So in a 25 man raid with hunter, warlock and dk pets on the boss, the mushrooms just heal a LOT less on the players itself if u put them in melee range. The mushrooms should only heal players, i dont see any use of the mushrooms healing pets.

Also increase the wildgrowth range to 40 yards (from the target casted on), since theres no point to let it on 30 yards, its just annoying.

And we need some useful lvl 90 talents. Our natures vigil is “okay” for resto druids, but we only use it for the 10% healing increase anyway, no one needs the little dmg it does (its just annoying if it breaks cc). But a 10% healing boost every 1,5 mins is just not as good as other healers lvl 90 talents, its too weak to count it as a healing cd. Our heart of the wild passive int/stamina increase is “okay” too and the 6 mins dmg cd is nice for maybe 1 fight out of 10, but other healing classes can do the same dmg without a 6 mins cd on it (monks/disc priests) and they can even heal while doing dmg, and we are doing 0 healing with the cd up, if we dont want to waste it. And dream of cenarius is just bad. So its nice to have hotw or natures vigil, but its just way worse than other healing classes lvl 90 talents.

But even if you would change those things i suggested, we could still not compete with other healers. I dont have a solution to make druids stronger, i think we just need some sort of utility for the raid to make us useful. It wont help to just buff our healing spells like reju or wildgrowth, it wont change a lot.
And the paladins mastery need a nerf finally. Its simply too strong and gives other healers (especially restodruids) no chance to get even close to their healing, but i think thats already known, i dont know why it takes so long to nerf an op healing class while dps classes get balanced/nerfed/buffed way faster. Paladins are just doing up to 40% of their healing with their mastery, thats just so wrong.

So yes, i like playing restodruid and im one of the very rare restodruids playing in the top pve guilds right now. So i would be very happy to see some changes soon so i dont have to reroll another class, just like many other top healers already did.

Post #2 by Owld of Method

As we’ve discussed it extensively with Nagura I’m roughly of the same opinion. And we’ve discussed it on our healing channel and we could see how people are disagreeing on this as well.

All of your ideas show one thing : druid haven’t evolved when other classes did. Druid playstyle is still the same, they just replaced some constrains with others.

Druid has long been a class with a lot of constrains that others did not share. We used to have to keep Mastery up and a 10s Lifebloom. Some will say that other classes have/had different constrains but I strongly disagree. Ours are not tied to our healing but are direct constrains to our gameplay, making it an actual pain to play our class to an above-average level.

The clear lack of potent smart healing spells that have no downside, Wild Growth being heavily lacking behind compared to CoH, Divine Star, Chi Burst, Chi Torpedo, Healing Stream totem or even Light of Dawn (when it was actually used), is making druid an excluded class. 

The lack of passive spells, that does the job for you without having to worry, is just mindblowing. We have close to nothing that is removed from our attention and actual actions and is free of constrains. Things like Earthliving, Restorative mists, Ancestral Awekening, HST, Prayer of Mending, Echo of light, Divine Aegis, Attonement (lol), Beacon of light, etc.. are simply making druid a subpar class.

We now rely more and more on a Rejuv blanketing, hoping that the target you just rolled Rejuv on will not get 4 smart heals instantly. You barely control your healing and it’s relying on a lot of RNG when there is quality healing to be done.

I’m not trying to say other classes have it easy. I’m simply stating the simple fact that they have the tools required for every situation and resto druid is just a pale alternative.

There have been way too many passive spells, smart heals, absorbs, procs and CDs added to the game and given to the classes during the past 2 expansions. All of them besides druid have seen their playstyle overhauled and now fit with the current content. Druid is just the same old stuff and this is why it’s currently lagging behind.

The change to mushroom was a good idea, one that has been around since CATACLYSM BETA, 3 years ago when mushroom was first introduced. And when it comes, it’s with 2 major constrains : 3 gcd and a build up mechanism.

Having played this game for more than 7 years, I think “continually evolving” should be called “permanent BETA”. There is no regularity and no precise view as to what classes should do/be. The amount of time it takes the devs to fix things like disc priest pre-5.2 is astonishing. The amount of time it will take them to fix paladin mastery will probably be on the same level (aka not before 5.4).

As much as I would personnaly hate it, the only way to fix druid is to give it the same attributes as the other classes. So you can understand my point here is a list of ideas (not at all that I want them all together applied) :

- Living Seed should be buffed to work on hots and proc on any damage as well as post-absorb. On the other side you reduce all our hots by a certain %.

- Lifebloom should always account for more than Beacon of Light on tanks. Simple logic = more constrains should reward more. Whether you buff it or nerf paladins, doesn’t matter. It’s still mindblowing for me to see how stupidly powerful Beacon of Light is and requires close to 0 attention. I’ve been complaining about this since early Cata (when LOD was transfering, what a joke).

- Change Nature’s vigil so that 10% of all your healing is evenly distributed in the raid. Make it 20% or 30%, considering how much better everyone else’s 90′ talents are.

- Change our mushrooms, again, so that you maintain the build up and make it so you can put 3 at the same time.

- Remove the f**cking pets from Wild Growth and Mushrooms targetting. This should just be common sense. You litteraly can’t pre-hot with WG, everything goes on pets.

- Harmonize Tranquility, Divine Hymn and Healing Tide totem. Either your remove the channeling, or your nerf the sh*t out of HTT.

- Make our gear scale better, thanks.

Honestly I have plenty of ideas to change every single spell we have to make them more competitive, not healing more but just to expand our toolkit.

ROUND UP

I understand that many of you feel anger and hurt at our current state in 25 man raiding and I totally get that. We feel under-appreciated and undervalued. But the truth is it is because we are less useful and less potent. The sooner we come to terms with that and hope that Blizzard tries to improve us or put us on par with the other healers (25m specifically) the sooner we’ll improve.

I think many of the points brought up by both of them echo sentiments many of my fellow druid bloggers. We need improved raid utility, improved smart or attention free healing, moving or perhaps non-channeled tranquility, moveable or player mounted mushrooms, WG and WM:B not hitting pets, any other combination of issues plaguing us fixed.

I don’t have the energy today to write a really long and thoughtful number crunching post and quite frankly they said everything perfectly fine.

A Fresh Look at Soul of the Forest (5.2 Napkin Math Edition)

I ended up breaking my 4 piece Tier 14 set fairly early on in order to clean up my leg slot (and get spirit) but found myself still using Soul of the Forest for certain encounters. Because of this I wanted to do another round-up of Soul of the Forest (and the many ways it can be used) in order to evaluate what we really end up getting out of it. All of this math is based upon a theoretical situation where each wild growth will find a sufficient number of targets that are in need of its full healing potential.

I understand that that there are situations where less than 6 (or 5) people are wounded and that does change the math considerably. I’ll try to address that to some degree here.

First let’s get the math out of the way before everyone’s eyes glaze over permanently! This is perfectly world stuff though and does not accurately simulate actual boss battle damage models.

Wild Growth potential throughput on paper

With my current test setup my wild growth healed a single person (8 ticks) for 49,989 health. I am running slightly above the 3043 break point.

With Glyph: hits 6 people and can be cast approximately 6 times per minute. This will heal for roughly 6 x 6 x 49,989 =  1,799,604 health per minute.

Costs 13,740 mana each time for a total of 82,440 mana, an overall HPM of 21.83

Without Glyph: hits 5 people and can be case approximately 7.5 times per minute. This will heal for roughly 7.5 x 5 x 49,989 = 1,874,587 health per minute.

Costs 103,050 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 18.19

Wild Growth with the Glyph and Soul of the Forest

With my current test setup my wild growth healed a single person (14 ticks) for 87,589 health, or roughly 75% more than a non SotF Wild Growth as we expected.

This spell will be cast approximately 4 times a minute healing for 6 x 4 x 87,589 for a total of 2,102,150 health per minute. This is roughly 302K more healing than without SotF talented.

Costs 54,960 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 38.25. You save 27,480 mana per minute which is approximately raw 2,290 mp/5.

Wild Growth without the Glyph and Soul of the Forest

With this setup you will be casting 7.5 Wild Growths per minute. I will say we average out to 3.75 non SotF casts and 3.75 SotF casts. It doesn’t line up evenly with the minute marker so that is just a crude breakdown.

Non-SotF Wild Growths will heal for 3.75 x 5 x 49,989 = 937,304 health per minute

SotF Wild Growths will heal for 3.75 x 5 x 87,589 = 1,642,304 health per minute.

Your total healing done per minute with this scenario is 2,579,609 health per minute. Costs 103,050 mana per minute, an overall HPM of 25.033

So here are the totals for all of the conditions we have investigated:

Regular Wild Growth /w Glyph

-   Health per minute: 1,799,604 baseline

-   HPM: 21.83

-   MP/5 difference: Baseline, 0

Regular Wild Growth w/o Glyph

-   Health per minute: 1,874,587 (+75K)

-   HPM: 18.19

-   MP/5 difference:   -1,717 mp/5

SotF Wild Growth /w Glyph

-   Health per minute: 2,102,150 (+302K)

-   HPM: 38.25

-   MP/5 difference: +2,290 mp/5

SotF Wild Growth w/o Glyph (alternating)

-   Health per minute: 2,579,609 (+780K)

-   HPM: 25.033

-   MP/5 difference: -1,717 mp/5

Take this with a grain of salt

We know firsthand that not EVERY cast of your wild growth is going to heal 6 people when glyphed rendering the glyph less optimal for that moment in time. We know that raid damage isn’t even going to warrant the spell being cast for periods of time. That aside these numbers still provide useful information.

Comparing this ability to Tree of Life is quite difficult to say the least. Using the most common example of SotF /w Glyph, you would have a theoretical healing gain of 906K every three minutes with a mp/5 gain of 2,290 constant. I can’t really model the mana savings from Incarnation’s clearcasting (though that is a legitimate usage of the spell to begin with) but in order for it to be comparable throughput wise, 20% of your healing done over 30 seconds would need to equal 906K. For that to happen you’d need to be putting out somewhere in the realm of ~200,000 HPS. The thing is, for periods of insanely intense damage that is NOT easily done but you will get up fairly high. You just need to tailor your usage of the spell to get the best mileage you can really.

While it seems like this post is an ad for Soul of the Forest be advised that it is not the case. Soul of the Forest is a nice passive style benefit that gives you mana back and boosts your throughput by a sizeable amount. Its effect averaged out through the course of an encounter is very strictly controlled by how the fight plays out and how closely you are able to adhere to the theoretical numbers above. Depending on how periodic the damage is you may find yourself going for stretches without having an opportunity to fully 100% benefit from your wild growth. Tree of Life has the advantage of being something you can plan and tailor your use to maximize its benefit on a per encounter basis. The catch is that sometimes there’s no one moment where Tree would be substantially beneficial and then it turns into a mana saving temporary boost cooldown.

You will more than likely find yourself waffling between these two abilities as you progress through normal or heroic mode encounters. I know for a fact I carry plenty of tomes of me in order to swap the talent on the fly.

Disclaimer: This is very napkin math-y. If you are one of those other math loving folks out there and you spot an error in my numbers please let me know so that I may address it as soon as possible.

Feeling The Balance Burn – Heroic T15 content

I was really hoping that the druid changes would leave me feeling more empowered and to be honest for the first week of Tier 15 it did. I genuinely felt like I was getting a lot more healing done and being productive.

Then we accepted another Discipline Priest. This makes 2 Disc Priests a Monk and a Paladin in our primary healing core. I’ve found that the absorbs do tend to do a number on what I have available to heal. But I shouldn’t let that get to me. It’s time for heroics right?

Well, the problem I have with heroics and granted I’ve only done two so far in this tier is Blizzard’s lean towards periodic heavy hitting raid AoE attacks that can be planned around. When you have things like Ionize or Dire Call in an encounter you are giving absorb healers a chance to maximize their efforts which is great! But it also means that there may not always be as much for others to do when absorbs and burst are the preferred method for dealing with it.

On Horridon last night I was feeling quite a bit of frustration as I played my heart out and just wasn’t seeing the numbers that I thought I should. Our disc priests were rocketing ahead absorbing up the dire calls like mad and I was doing what I could to blanket heals where needed and have wild mushrooms available in exactly the right spots where the raid will be as we kite mobs.

I’m still feeling lackluster though. I am also seeing a couple issues with the predictable pattern and absorb plan when it comes to our healing. When priests are able to completely or mostly negate the damage from an effect on people within the raid (but not everyone) it cause my wild mushrooms to be incredibly erratic. Despite a handful of people being near them if half of those people got shielded up the wazoo the mushrooms would simply overheal them like a boss. I sometimes got upwards of 50-60% overheal from the mushrooms despite great placement.

My second gripe is one that I touched on in my previous post. When the raid is taking rather significant damage and I can’t overheal with rejuvenation at all (which is theoretically fine mind you) I don’t ever get that option to provide burst healing. If an encounter does periodic damage to people at a rate where every couple of ticks of rejuvenation might end up overhealing due to other healers healing then I would at least get to store up some for a big burst when another raid wide ability decimates us. When everyone is hovering or struggling in health I don’t like losing the chance to recharge that spell. It is what it is though we simply need to trade off our burst for effective rejuvenation healing at that point I suppose.

This may come off as whining but its more that I’m just feeling frustrated. I want to feel useful and relevant. Someone in my guild said yesterday “it must be easy to rank as a resto druid right now, no guilds are taking them to the hard stuff”. While that’s clearly an exaggeration and I, and others, are clearly being taken to raids…it is still a rather dangerous mentality that is floating around out there. As fights become predictable or people gain familiarity with encounters the absorb mechanics and smart heals will continue to be very favorable and these are strong healing classes to begin with. No one likes playing the healing class that all other healing classes unanimously agree is the weakest of all of them.

Wild Mushroom Usage in Throne of Thunder

I wanted to write a post based off of my experience with all twelve bosses last week during normal modes pertaining to the use of our new Wild Mushroom Bloom. There are a multitude of ways to use them in each fight and I found their healing to be fairly useful. You will often find them doing anywhere between a few percent of your overall healing to upwards of 12 or 14% depending on how things work for you.

Before we get into the fight specifics let us look at what it does for us and what tools we want to use to help the cause

Addon and Weak Aura

There are two very simplistic methods that I have seen to track the mushrooms that use very little screen real estate. The first is a weak aura created by Civilian on the Elitist Jerks druid forum, the link to the import string is here http://pastebin.com/yVzjUjXc . This happens to be what I am using currently. There is also a mod available that does roughly the same thing with a nice little UI setup. The link to that is here: http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/shroomhelper Thanks to WTSHeals for pointing me to that option.

Effect

Wild Mushrooms as you know cap out at roughly 1/3 of your overall health give or take a little bit. With three planted you get roughly your total maximum health. For me right now my mushrooms store up to 490K bonus healing. Applying Naturalist and Mastery bumps this up to roughly 674K healing done. Assuming a 18% chance to crit in raid environment you will generally average 795K healing done based solely on the overheal bonus. In reality that number will fluctuate above or below that amount by potentially sizeable margins if RNG is in your favor or not. For now we can use that number as a numerical average.

The base heal is slightly less reliable as it is subject to diminishing returns. I would say on average it will heal a single person somewhere between 7 and 15K which is not insignificant but not necessarily relevant to the current discussion.

Uses

For me there are a handful of uses for wild mushrooms during fights. I generally rank them as follows:

Raid Wide: You won’t necessarily hit everyone in the raid but there are certainly encounters where you can arrange for a large majority of the raid to be grouped up for a specific mechanic. This also benefits other ground based heals as well such as your swiftmend. I’d say on average when attempting to do this you’ll probably hit 15 to 20 people with it given some might end up outside of the area of effect. This will result in roughly 63K down to 50K healing per person. This is basically like hitting everyone in the raid with half of a crit regrowth simultaneously. Not insignificant.

Cluster: For some fights where you are required to be in smaller groups or spread out in a wider area you can position it such that the people near you or near a specific marker are affected by the mushrooms. This might be anywhere from 5 to 7 people. This would end up as on average 175K down to 125K give or take. I have found that ‘melee’ as a general group can often qualify as a valid cluster to mushroom on some encounters.

Small cluster or single person: When you can’t guarantee any sizeable number of people will be in any one place at any one time but you do know where one, two, or three people of import will be at any one time then this is a viable option. If you hit between 1 and 3 people with this then you’re looking at between 800K down to 275K for this situation. If no more useful options are viable this is useful on tanks. Just be careful with your placement if you are designing this to be used on tanks. I’ve had a few encounters where if placed wrong the melee creep up and steel some healing away from the tank as pure overhealing.

Personal: If all else fails drop the mushrooms roughly where you’ll be hanging out at any point in the fight. IF you do this do not push the growth of the mushrooms. Simply use them as needed to give yourself a self-heal to deal with the encounter’s mechanics.

 

THONE OF THUNDER

All of this aside my usage of Wild Mushrooms varied wildly over the course of our clear of the place last week

Jin’Rohk the Breaker

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low

Tanks being stationary: Low

Mushroom Viability: Low

I personally found wild mushrooms to be extremely lackluster during this fight, and honestly any of the first three fights. This is not to say that they were useless. This is one of a few encounters where I viewed wild mushrooms to simply be a manner of delivering free healing. I did not push them to grow nor was I ever attached to any particular planting of them. When I saw where the raid was grouping up in a puddle I dropped some mushrooms and proceeded to heal as normal. Sometimes I dropped them around the boss. Anything you get from mushrooms in this encounter is purely gravy and shouldn’t consist of anything more than a couple % of your overall healing done.

 

Horridon

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very Low

Tanks being stationary: Low

Mushroom Viability: Low

This is another encounter that I would classify as not mushroom friendly. It’s not really even that friendly for swiftmend althought you’ll still get enough mileage out of its effloressence. This fight is clearly better suited for rejuvenation, wild growth, and incarnation lifebloom spreading. I think this is a fight that if you tried too hard to shoehorn mushrooms into it that you’ll actually come out with a HPS loss because of the hoops you’ll jump through. I learned this the hard way because in my desire to provide this type of information to you the reader I was doing just that.

 

Council

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Moderate

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low to Moderate

This is a fight where you can get some usage out of wild mushrooms with consistancy. As long as you aren’t trying to force the mushrooms up to full potential before popping them you can certainly place them at the feet of the bosses as they are empowered. Being able to offer some nearly free healing to the tank and/or melee is perfectly fine. Expect it to still be a small percentage of your overall healing done but the mana cost of detonation is so low that there is generally no harm in doing it. There are some parts of the encounter with enough significant AoE damage going on that the 3 GCD’s to plant the mushrooms will be a detriment. Use your better judgement when doing so.

 

Tortos

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very High

Tanks being stationary: Very High

Mushroom Viability: Very High

Tortos was the first fight that screamed to use mushrooms. I had a specific spot on the ground somewhat near the boss that the raid would group up on just prior to every quake. Ground based AoE heals were planted there and fully charged mushrooms were detonated immediately after control of our characters returned. I believe I was able to have mushrooms prepped for every single quake. I think organization and coordination worked to trivialize this encounter once we knew exactly how to manage it. I found it helpful to call out on vent for people to group up for mushrooms as sometimes people’s brains turn off mid fight.

 

Magaera

Movement: Low

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very High

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Very High

Magaera was another fight where wild mushrooms were perfect which was pleasant immediately following Tortos. We just grouped the entire raid up near the front of the ridge and had all of the frost beams and fire behind us as needed. Adjustment was required but in general I was able to use fully charged mushrooms for almost all of the rampages and even some of the acid ball barrages from the venomous heads. The value of mushrooms is highly dependent on your raids strategy but for us it worked out perfectly. Any fight with extremely predictable intense raid wide damage is a huge boon to wild mushrooms (and to pre-hot’ing as well). Become familiar with the rate at which your raid is killing heads and plan accordingly.

 

Ji-Kun

Movement: Moderate*

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: High

Tanks being stationary: High

Mushroom Viability: High

* Raid members tasked with killing the hatchlings may or may not have difficulting taking part in your wild mushroom detonation depending on the timing

This is a fight where if you are NOT required to fly to any of the nests, you can utilize wild mushrooms extremely well. I organized a spot for raid members to run to for Quill to pick up some quick ground based healing and wild mushroom detonation. IT was of course up to the raid members to immediately scamper away to a safe spread so they did not die to Caw. This of course lasted untill we made a third nest team and I was assigned to it. Once I was going to the nests I had literally no way to reliably stack or maintain the wild mushrooms. Once you go to the high nests it is impossible to keep track of their progress. It is a single phase fight though so if you are on the platform you can consistantly use bloom throughout the whole encounter.

 

Durumu The Forgotten

Movement: Very High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Very Low

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low

For two out of three phases of this encounter, that repeat with regularity, people are pretty much always moving with the exception of the blue beam soakers and the tanks on occasion. I would recommend using wild mushrooms for the encounter but very judiciously. You aren’t really looking to power them up any more than would be done from run of the mill overheal. I used mushrooms almost exclusively on the tanks for this encounter as I wanted a huge heal available for the tank during the red/blue/yellow beam phase especially if I was constantly on the move (yellow). Don’t exepct this to be overwhelmingly useful here and do NOT force it. Simply place them and charge them when it is convenient and confer with your tank on the best placement to give them the most amount of wiggle room.

 

Primordius

Movement: wtf?

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: wtf?

Tanks being stationary: wtf?

Mushroom Viability: Myself only

I have little I can offer on this fight. Somehow we did it in only a matter of minutes where it is intended to be a 7+ minute encounter for others. Stuff was going on, people were taking a ton of damage, the world was flying on its head and somehow by the grace of our good healing core we held it together. That being said I only really used mushrooms at my feet and prairie dogged it while we held it together. Perhaps if this fight is done properly then they might be better? Unsure.

 

Dark Animus

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low to start, High at the end

Tanks being stationary: Low to start, High at the end

Mushroom Viability: Myself to start, then Tank, then raid

I started off with a charged stack of mushrooms on my spot where I tanked one of the animus adds. I used that as a buffer so I could begin healing other people with lifebloom on myself. If my animus ever made headway OR another animus passed by following someone dodging explosions I could pop the mushrooms to absorb the much larger hits. Once my animus was killed or taken off of my I dropped my mushrooms on the nearby tank picking up other animus. Is there a plural of animus? I don’t know. Anyway, when the final Dark Animus was spawned and the raid worked on burning it down before the soft enrage killed us all I found that mushrooms worked fairly well on the raid. Here’s the rub though. With Dark Animus as well as the final phaes of Iron Qon it is extremely difficult to use Wild Mushrooms because your rejuvenation is doing much less overhealing. Any scenario where the whole raid is being pummeled by AoE damage that is consistent and keeps people from being topped off the less you’ll be able to utilize Bloom. This is something you’ll need to be aware of and you may want to place and charge a set of shrooms before the raid damage intensifies to the point where you’ll no longer fill them up.

 

Iron Qon

Movement: Moderate

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: High

Tanks being stationary: High

Mushroom Viability: High

Iron Qon is a four phase fight where the effect of your mushrooms will vary wildly. The first phase consists of your raid clustering and spreading around specific locations in sequence in order to force him to do his fire attack and keep his energy down. This attack does a significant amount of damage divided among your group. We did two pulses per group in succession with three groups taking turns. My group consisted of 7 people so mushrooms would be hitting everyone for roughly 25%+ of their life which coupled with the other healer and my HoT’s was enough to easily recover from the first of the two attacks. I simply used Tranquility and Incarnation to absorb the brunt of the second in each of the first two times my group soaked. I rate this is very high bordering on amazing usage of mushrooms.

The second and third phases have lots of spreading out and movement and are not necessarily great for mushrooms so I wouldn’t push too hard. If you can casually charge them under the tank and melee then by all means do so but don’t force it.

The fourth phase was grouping up again and mushrooms worked great here. I couldn’t necessarily pop them more than a couple of times as the raid damage was significant enough at the end that I had little to no overhealing done. This is an odd drawback to the wild mushrooms. There are times we would love the AoE burst the most and cannot actually charge them up to do so. This is OK because those situations are the ones that make Rejuvenation shine. When it doesn’t overheal it is one of the most effective heals in the game hands down.

 

Twin Consorts

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Low

Tanks being stationary: Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Low

There isn’t much to say about this encounter really. As a healer all your raid leader needs to tell you is “spread out, don’t get hit by stuff and heal everyone”. The fight is technical and the constellation running is some of the coolest stuff that I’ve seen but the fight doesn’t have you doing anything particularly unusual. I ended up using mushrooms where the tanks were positioned when possible to get some extra healing on the melee but it was not a high priority. Bloom when convenient but do not push their growth here.

 

Lei Shen

Movement: High

Consistant Grouping for Long Durations/Events: Moderate

Tanks being stationary: Low to Moderate

Mushroom Viability: Moderate

I will add a disclaimer that I was not in for the kill so I cannot go into extensive details about the last phase of the encounter. What I can tell you is that I was utilizing mushrooms for the first and second phases and intermissions. As you move from pillar to pillar it is easy to plant the mushrooms where the tanks and melee are going to be. Depending on which pillar you are at you’ll have more or less healing to do so you can use your own judgment on how much you want to try to force their growth. Even if you squeeze a little healing out of each Bloom that is still more than worth the minimal mana it takes to detonate it. During intermission however I recommend getting a fully charged mushroom stack online as you get into your quadrant so that you can utilize it during Static Charge if you get one. Mechanics, RNG, and movement play a huge role in whether or not you’ll get effective blooms during this encounter but you can certainly utilize it for some effect. I can write more about this later.

 

Final Words

Now that we’re starting heroic modes I’ll have more to offer on those later. Sometimes heroic modes require more grouping up for healing as needed or more spreading out to avoid new mechanics. All of this and more will affect how much we can or cannot use Wild Mushrooms.

I’d love to hear about your experience with them and what you have thought about them so far! I hope everyone is having a good time in Throne of Thunder!

 

Magic Mushroom Buff…where are we going dude?

So where are we going with these Wild Mushrooms! …and how did we get here?

It’s no secret that right now restoration druids are at the bottom of the pile. We don’t offer any significant raid cooldowns that other classes don’t do better and we have no spammable AoE burst healing. In any fight where the raid groups up we should, barring any skill variance, fall behind other healers and even more so if the fight caters well to spirit shell. This isn’t to say that we are not useful as druid healing is, as always, incredibly potent at helping to stabilize the raid.

Blizzard ‘seems’ to be acknowledging this with their change to wild mushrooms. Their idea is to allow us to take a percentage of our rejuvenation overhealing, which will happen when our heals get sniped in frantic healing situations, and funnel it into a sizeable mushroom bloom when needed. What this does is allow them to keep the bloom cooldown at 10 seconds, but arrange it so that should we want these mushrooms at full potential the cooldown effectively becomes much longer and requires additional mana in the form of rejuvenation casts.

Functionality:

The current build suggests that each mushroom can ‘store’ up to 33% of our total health pool as additional bonus healing (completely subject to additional tweaks) and upon release will split the healing done among all targets within range. With three mushrooms this would be a total amount of bonus healing equal to 100% of your total health or approximately 460K (before mastery and other such bonuses).

Limitations:

Other AoE effects state that a fixed amount of life is returned per tick and is usually subjected to diminishing returns. Ghostcrawlers terminology seems to imply that this healing done is split evenly between all members caught within the blast. This also seems to imply that there is no diminishing returns and that the effect is simply limited by the amount you were able to store in the mushrooms and the number of players involved.

Speculations and Assumptions:

I am assuming that his terminology means that the amount healed is not divided by some fixed number in the anticipation of healing a certain number of players. Swiftmend for example heals three people for a fixed amount and will not increase the amount healed if only one person (the MT for example) stands within it. If that is the case then the ability can be used in some creative ways.

Charging the mushrooms

Depending on the encounter a set of mushrooms may take somewhere between 20 and 30 seconds to fill up if people are taking damage. You could certainly game the system by placing multiple rejuvenations on players who are not hurt (especially if they have any way to increase healing received) to speed it up. The new 4 piece Tier 15 set bonus seems to have a rather interesting synergy with this as well. With this new set bonus each time rejuvenation heals (1 initial 4 ticks at base cast, 5 ticks at standard haste levels) it gains a 6% increase to healing done. For those using the first haste break point it means it ticks at 100%, 106%, 112%, 118%, 124%, and 130%.

If one were to get your haste into the mid six thousands, something feasible in t14, and more than likely really feasible in T15, you could use the tier 15 set bonus along with the new Soul of the Forest to pull off interesting shenanigans. Let’s say your rejuvenation ticks for 15,000 base non crit. With the 70% haste from Soul of the Forest and T15 4 piece bonus your rejuvenation would tick 9 times for a total of ~190,000. This one rejuvenation, if entirely overheal would contribute 47,625 bonus healing to each mushroom which is about 1/3 of what it can store. Each additional rejuvenation would each contribute 25,875 bonus healing. This means one supercharged rejuvenation and 4 regulars might be enough to fill up your mushrooms provided they were overhealing.

While this can speed up the process of charging up the mushrooms I don’t know if giving up Incarnation is worth it nor might it be worth it to encourage a playstyle focused on gathering up overhealing. All of my numbers are entirely speculative though as I’m pulling some stuff out of the air and much of the ability isn’t anywhere close to finalized.

Use

So the question is what do we DO with this new version of wild mushroom. The answer is…it depends. With some tier 15 gear you’ll probably be able to get your HP up to 470,000 or 480,000 with somewhere in the realm of 23 to 24% mastery provided you don’t change your haste target. Let’s say this gives us a bank of 595,000 bonus healing in your mushrooms (198,400 individual mushroom). Right now mushrooms heal for 10K give or take a little bit. I don’t know exactly how much because…well I don’t care to know. With diminishing returns in 25 man it probably dips down to the 6K or 7K range more than likely.

Assuming that the bloom splits the bonus healing evenly with no penalty on top of the core explosion then on a 23 person group (often times the tanks aren’t standing on your side of the boss when grouped up) you have 26K healing per person and something like 32K per person if you get the core explosion too. This means you can heal each member for a whopping 6.7% of their life. This is a little less than two ticks of rejuvenation on everyone. I’m not going to say that I’m particularly excited about this because it doesn’t feel like a massive benefit for the amount of time and mana invested. I’d like to know if someone has the math on how much per person Healing Rain gives over its duration.

In a 10 man raid things change slightly. Let’s say the tanks are standing on one side of the boss and you have 8 players standing on the other side. In this scenario each player would be healed for 74K from the bonus healing and 80K if the core explosion is added. This would be ~17% of everyone’s health which is almost like feeding a healthstone to the whole raid. Now we’re getting somewhere.

If you push it a little further and refine the explosion to cover only select numbers of people then you will see even more burst potential though highly focused. They would heal one person for 600,000, two people for 300,000, three people for 200,000, four people for 150,000 etc. You have the potential to provide a spare lay on hands for the tank or some sizeable heals for anyone forced to soak a certain mechanic in a known area of the battlefield.

Catch

As with everything there are considerable catches to this spell.

-Just as before you must deal with the 3 GCD’s to place them.

-You must now charge them up and monitor the amount stored within them though I would wager a guess someone will create a mod to track this for you.

-Then you must time your detonation to maximize its effect. There is a risk a good portion of your explosion will end up overhealing if you are trying to heal say half of your 23 people who took damage while clustered together.

-The raid or raid member(s) might be forced to move away from the designated location making your effort for naught. The counter to this is that the mushrooms should be quite large and easy to spot so your designated people might still be able to run to them and get healed.

Verdict

I find their idea interesting but ultimately somewhat underwhelming given the setup. It doesn’t seem like they will be amazing at solving some of our current weaknesses which is a reliable tool to handle burst AoE damage in raids and a reliable tool to keep us even when the raid is grouped up doing AoE healing. In those scenarios the ability will be going off only every so often and not for a significant amount compared. There is some serious potential In using them on smaller groups of people but there is a high level of coordination involved making sure those people are near the mushrooms at the time you need to detonate them. This may end up being a high risk, high investment, poor or risky reward type scenario. You could have fabulous luck with it and you could have absolutely abysmal luck with it.

Tank Healing – potential to be a free lay on hands every 30 or 40 seconds  during a fight with some coordination if the cards all fall where they need to fall.

25 man Raid Healing – potential to be a modest heal among your raid (28-30K), a medium heal among your melee or ranged (50-75K), and a decent heal among a small group of players (75-125K) if everything goes right

10 man Raid Healing – potential to be medium heal among your raid (75-95K) , a decent heal among just melee or ranged (100-150K) if everything goes right

Lunchtime Napkin Math – How much mana do we really have?

In a world where we have a fixed mana supply we need to think about how much mana we have available and how much we’d like to have available. This is purely napkin math though so please don’t take it as canon. I just like to think about resources in a more analytical sense. First let us try to approximate some stats for our theoretical druid. I’ll leave the equations out so you can certainly modify them to suit your needs.

The numbers:

Spirit Regen:

Let us assume we have a modestly geared raiding druid who currently has 14,750 intellect (with HotW) and 9,000 spirit baseline. There are other factors that will increase regeneration and we will add those in in a moment.

Spirit regeneration = (.001+Spirit*(sqrt(Int))*Base_Regen)*5

Using some known character sheets and crunching some basic math I’ve come up with a value of .00374 for Base_Regen which means this druid’s spirit based regeneration is 20,440 mp/5. With the 50% in combat tax we get 10,220 mp/5. Given that we only really care about in combat regen we can apply the 50% penalty to the Base_Regen value reducing it to .000187

With the addition of mark of the wild and spirit flask/food (which are taboo to some I know) the druids stats change gaining 700 intellect and 1250 spirit. He now has 15,450 intellect and 10,250 spirit. These changes change our regeneration to 11,912 mp/5.

There is of course more spirit based regeneration to take into account. Let us assume this druid is using the Darkmoon Faire trinket and Shado-Pan Valor Point rep trinket. I’m going to, at least for now, set the Relic of Chi Ji at 1,250 average spirit, and the Scroll of Revered Ancestors at 899 average spirit. This 2,149 additional spirit for this druid when raid buffed yields 2,497 mp/5.

The last thing I’d like to add is mana tide totem. Not everyone has the benefit of having one of these available should you raid in a 10 man but it is worthwhile noting what it grants you. Let’s assume that the shaman has 10,000 spirit (I know it is probably low) spirit raid buffed when activating the totem. This grants you 20,000 spirit for 16 seconds every three minutes. With a 9% uptime this gives you an average spirit bonus of 1,800 or 2,091 mp/5.

Additional class/common sources of regen:

Innervate is our class’ primary source of mana regeneration outside of spirit. For right now there are two scenarios I will entertain. I am going to assume a fight that lasts roughly 7 to 7.5 minutes during which there is at least a short period of ramp-up in the beginning. During this fight if it is less taxing you will more than likely use two innervates. If the fight is heroic and it hits the ground running you might use 3 (30 second mark, 3:30 mark, and 6:30 mark). Let’s opt for two innervates for the moment and we could always average it up to 2.5 if you so desire. Two innervates yield 120,000 mana. Divide this out over a 7 minute encounter and you have 1,429 mp/5.

Mana potions are not terribly significant but they are generally useful as they can offer you some mana in a lump sum at a key point between innervates if stuff is going wrong. I don’t remember the exact amount but if you are using the channeling potion that returns 40,000 or so mana back you’ll be giving yourself another 476 mp/5.

I am not including the priest hymn or Omen of Clarity because I don’t have the exact math to back it up. Given that Omen casts, while mana saving, are free they don’t really factor into fight longevity anyways. They are still, of course, awesome.

Total:

What we are left with us the following: 11,912 + 2,497 + 2,091 + 1,427 + 476 = 18,403 mp/5

Constant Spells

There are certain spells that you are going to cast whether you like it or not. These spells are: Lifebloom, Wild Growth, and Swiftmend. These spells are good enough and potent enough that they will be used on cooldown and must be utilized to their fullest over the length of an encounter. As such you can almost think of them as constant sources of mana drain. Whatever is left over after that is fair game for…well the one other bread and butter spell we have really. Yes Tree of Life changes the math entirely but as that is technically an option I’m going to forgo the math on that at least for now.

Lifebloom will be recast approximately 3 times every minute. I am assuming there will be some amount of target swapping. This produces a negative 885 mp/5 drain on your mana.

Swiftmend will be cast approximately 4 times every minute. I am assuming aggressive use of this spell as it provides significant benefit to multiple targets or it can provide supplemental healing to your tank as required. This equates to a negative 1,700 mp/5 drain on your mana.

Wild Growth is generally good enough to be cast on cooldown however I know that not all fights require it to be cast ALL the time especially right off the bat. White you can technically cast the spell 6 times per minute let us assume that based on fight mechanics it only averages out to 5 (though it might be lower if the fight is less AoE taxing). At 5 casts per minute this equates to a negative 5,725 mp/5 drain on your mana.

If you think about your mana as a budget then these abilities constitute your rent, insurance, student loans, food etc. They add up to a total of 8,310 mp/5 drain.

What’s left

If our napkin math is holding up we can figure out roughly what we have remaining. Our regen provided us with 18,403 mp/5 and we remove 8,310 mp/5 from it leaving us with 10,093 mp/5. Our simulation here is extremely crude mind you but we can approximate, using this, just how much we have to spend on rejuvenation and regrowth as required.

Assuming the 7 minute encounter that I hypothesized above, this regen provides you with 847,812 mana in addition to your base 300,000 mana for a total of 1,147,810 mana.

Every non-clearcast regrowth consumes 17,820 mana or 1.55% of your complete remaining mana supply, every rejuvenation consumes .9% of your compete remaining mana supply, and every tranquility consumes 1.4% of your remaining mana supply.

An example of what you *might* end up using is:

2x Tranquility = 2.8%

15x Regrowth = 23.25%

80x Rejuvenation = 72%

Leaving you ~2% mana for wiggle room and casting additional spells as needed

I do understand that regrowth usage is entirely subjective and is fight dependent. You might find yourself using way more of it depending on burst requirements for both tank and raid members.

Character Growth

As the player develops his gear he or she will acquire additional intellect and spirit on their pieces in approximately a 1:2 ratio purely by way of item level. He or she may also opt for sidegrades (or gem) that grant additional spirit at the expense of other secondary stats and maintain a constant intellect level. The amount of mp/5 required to gain 1 additional rejuvenation over the course of the 7 minute battle is 114 mp/5. To achieve this they must add either 98 spirit, or 85 spirit and 42 intellect.

Note: As the fight gets longer than 7 minutes the above complete mana pool numbers will shift significantly however the amount of spirit needed to add rejuvenations also drops (though each rejuvenation added is a smaller % of your overall healing done). If the fight lasts for say, 10 minutes, then the amount of regen needed to add one more rejuvenation becomes 80 mp/5. This means only 70 spirit (or 60 spirit and 30 intellect) is required to grant you an additional cast.

Healing Primer – Heroic Spine of Deathwing; Madness of Deathwing (25 man)

Healing Primer – Heroic Spine of Deathwing; Madness of Deathwing (25 man)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here and a lot of that has to do with end of expansion burnout and real life responsibilities creeping up. I’m not an alt-a-holic by any means so as things wind down at the tail end of the expansion as the nerfs render difficult content trivial I tend to lose a significant amount of interest in World of Warcraft. It picks up again with the next expansion but it does sap my motivation to post. I haven’t even had time to play the Beta but that is mostly due to me playing other games!

That being said I wanted to talk about the last two heroic encounters and discuss healing them. Before I begin though I want to mention that I am not discussing a lot of the non-healing strategy specifics here because honestly it never really registered what is being done. I tended to put my nose to the grindstone and focus on healing as these are probably the two most mana intensive and healing intensive fights in the zone.

 

Heroic Spine of Deathwing

Group make-up: 2 full tanks, 1 CatBear, 6 healers, 16 full time DPS

Healer breakdown: 1 druid, 1 priest, 2 shaman, 2 paladin; we have the option of adding either a shaman, paladin, or holy priest as needed

This fight has no distinct phases in the sense many other encounters do. The fight escalates in difficulty as time passes and certain moments are significantly more stressful than others. The way I generally break it down in my head is as follows:

-Amalgamation DPS and blood gathering ‘phase’

-Amalgamation Nuclear raid damage ‘phase

-Tendon Burn

-Amalgamation DPS and blood gathering ‘phase’

-Amalgamation Nuclear raid damage ‘phase’

-Tendon Burn

-Kill Corruption, Barrel Roll, and Clear Debuffs

This repeats two additional times for each plate. As the fight moves on the raid gains stacks of Degradation that reduces your maximum HP by 5% for each Amalgamation death. This will stack up to a minimum of 30% over the course of the fight. Given the chance for Searing Plasma and Fiery Grip combinations as well as people inadvertently taking Blood hits you have the potential for unpleasant deaths if you are not careful.

There is also another mechanic to be aware of and that is Blood Corruption: Death. I have personally never handled the dispels for this however I do understand how it functions. This debuff is a raid wiper if not managed, and must be dispelled until it morphs into Blood corruption: Earth. At that point you have a limited number of dispels to control who this comes to rest on and morphs again into Blood of Neltharion a massively beneficial damage reduction buff. Having this on your tanks is a high priority and monitoring these debuffs is a fairly intensive job. Because of that one of your healers is going to be paying a lot of attention to it and will not necessarily be healing at full capacity. Discipline priests work great for this because they can’t reliably contribute to Searing Plasma but their abilities and cooldowns are still very much desired.

 

Healing Strategy

This fight is basically whack-a-mole for you as a restoration druid. There are no significant positioning requirements except for the barrel rolls and you pretty much free to focus entirely on your healing. Because of this you should be able to maximize your throughput, perfectly time your innervates concentration potion and tree of life and, should you use it, your Jaw of Defeat activations.

Working with your teammates cooldowns – we often find ourselves running with two shamans and two paladins for the great raid wide cooldowns as well as the mana regeneration from mana tide. Each barrel roll is given an aura mastery and spirit link totem. Each nuclear blast is given an aura mastery as well. The second spirit link is used for one nuclear blast and power word barrier the other. This does not include the prot. Paladin cooldown or warrior shouts which are used in a rotation as well. I tend to use my tranquility during the barrel roll as it harmonizes perfectly with spirit link distributing your healing and helping to break or put dents in most of the Searing Plasma debuffs.

Spec – Right now I’m still running the 8/2/31 spec with points in Furor for maximum mana though I could probably switch over to 10/0/31 at my gear level. I do raid healing predominantly as the paladins have the tanks covered for the most part.

Managing mana – I will often use my Jaws of Defeat for this encounter though it isn’t normally one of my main trinkets. I enjoy any added effective mana regen I can get that doesn’t come at any drawback. Maximizing the benefit of Jaws of Defeat as well as your T13 set bonus when innervate is cast (with power torrent up for even more benefit) can also make a world of difference. These aren’t things I can necessarily prescribe exact times for as you need to make a judgment call on when to activate them. It will also depend on your raid composition and what portions of the fight are more strenuous for you. During each plate you can expect the nuclear blast portion followed by debuff clearing during the burn to require a significant amount of casting as well as going into and out of the barrel rolls. During the last plate it is going to be fairly intense at any point so it is all fair game. I tend to hold off on my concentration potion until just after the first tendon burn on the second plate (or later) if I can as I can sustain a pretty substantial portion of my mana until later that plate going into the third one.

So what do I do exactly?

This fight is very spammy. I find that my healing rotation for this fight is actually based on a priority system. This isn’t the perfect order but I generally try to following this logic string:

1.) If lifebloom isn’t maxed out on a tank max it out

2.) If swiftmend is off cooldown use it, check for a feral druid or resto shaman candidate first

3.) Prime a heal on anyone that has Searing Plasma as well as Fiery Grip (non-tendon burn grips should be quick)

4.) Cast rejuvenation (or free regrowth) on anyone that has Searing Plasma

5.) Address anyone injured that does not have searing plasma, this jumps up the list if they’re severely hurt

CD 1) Tree of Life leading into one of the two nuclear phases per plate to mitigate damage and clear debuffs

CD 2) Tranquility during barrel rolls alongside SLT

CD 3) Use barkskin liberally, best used during Nuclear Blast or Fiery Grip if you have Searing Plasm

I find that this fight is largely dependent on how everyone else plays. Since other players can greatly minimize the amount of damage the raid takes you will find that your job and all healer’s jobs for that matter, will get a lot easier as the raid becomes more familiar with the encounter. Some examples of this are: killing bloods properly, people not taking too much damage from the bloods, better blood kiting during third plate, timing grips so that you don’t have full duration grip during a burn phase, and DPS precasting and breaking grips almost immediately. If these types of things are handled then you are free to do your work and maintain a fairly constantly stream of rejuvenation spam. If things get hairy and you are forced to use more direct heals without clearcasting then you will have mana problems.

When first learning this encounter, and on your first kill, you will probably be reaching OOM just before or just as the fight draws to a close. It takes some experience balancing your mana expenditure to achieve this. I have to credit Beruthiel over at Falling Leaves and Wings who gave me some points as we were about a week or two behind her guild working on this encounter. All it really took me was swapping to Jaws of Defeat (I know I wasn’t using it! Crazy) and better cooldown management and I was good to go. This is a fight where healing meters are fairly useful though normally I dismiss them entirely. Throughput is a significant part of the healer game plan here and you do need to make sure everyone is pulling their weight especially with all the Searing Plasma going on.

 

Heroic Madness of Deathwing (25m)

Here’s a video I made about a month ago of our first heroic madness kill. This is a good lesson in what NOT to do for mana management. While I played well enough and was top in healing my lifebloom uptime was down to 86% which is a significant loss of mana. I very much felt that at the end of the fight when things were getting extremely hairy. Since this kill I’ve learned to manage and throttle my mana usage to allow for liberal casting  through the entire head phase at the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCoAJb20b_A

Group Make-up: 2 tanks (paladin, warrior, or druid), 6 healers (no specific classes except usually two shamans), 17 DPS

Phase 1 (Platforms)

Strategy: Our platform order is Ysera, Alextrasza, Nozdormu, and then Kalecgos. We get two rounds of blistering tentacles that we must kill as a raid and one elementium meteor that is un-slowed. From what I know this is considered the conventional approach to the encounter.

On each platform you will face the same obstacles that you do on normal, with one exception, prior to returning to the limb tentacle though they do more damage. Strong tank or healer cooldowns are required to handle the Corruption’s impale burst damage at the end of its countdown and a raid wide cooldown (or two) is advisable for the last platform when the elementium meteor lands. For two platforms the raid is responsible for killing the blistering tentacles in much the same fashion as on normal though a smaller raid cooldown like Aura Mastery can help to soften the damage if they stay up for a little longer than desired.

The one dangerous ability that is added to the encounter is the Corrupting Parasite. Twice per platform a raid member will be infected and have a short period of time to run to the time bubble left by Nozdormu. This debuff does increasing damage over time and must be healed through as a failure to do so risks killing additional players and a poor placement of the resulting add. Once the debuff expires, through duration or death, a Corrupting Parasite spawns and begins casting. If it is allowed to finish its cast then it deals damage to the raid relative to the amount of hit points that it has remaining. The time bubble helps to slow this cast to allow the raid to kill it outright prior to finishing its cast or make it so that it has so little HP left that it is negligible. The damage from the parasite will more often than not be a non-issue until the fourth platform when the raid is missing most of the aspect buffs. It is ideal to have a raid wide cooldown available for each explosion if possible but they are primarily required for the fourth platform when it will hit the hardest relative to everyone’s life total.

There are three impale hits per platform if I recall correctly with the tank’s major cooldowns covering the first for each of them and one external major cooldown covering the third. Warrior cries are also great to use if you have enough of them in the raid to cover all three impales. We tend to run three to four in our raid so there was never any issue in doing this.

Ultimately it boils down to the following:

Platform 1 – DPS Corruption tentacle and heal through smashes and use cooldowns for impale, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops, Kill elementium meteor before it lands, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops, Kill Corruption, Kill Regenerative Bloods, DPS body tentacle without dealing with Blistering Tentacles. Use dream as necessary. Ranged DPS start on platform 4 in order to drop it to 91% before jumping to platform 1 to deal with Corrupting Parasite.

Platform 2 – DPS Corruption tentacle and heal through smashes and use cooldowns for impale, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops if possible, Kill elementium meteor before it lands, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops if possible, Kill Corruption, Kill Regenerative Bloods, DPS body tentacle without dealing with Blistering Tentacles.

Platform 3 – DPS Corruption tentacle and heal through smashes and use cooldowns for impale, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops if possible, Kill elementium meteor before it lands, Drop parasite into time bubble and kill before it pops if possible, Kill Corruption, Kill Regenerative Bloods, DPS body tentacle while also killing both sets of Blistering Tentacles. Cooldowns become more important with HP decrease.

Platform 4 – DPS Corruption tentacle and heal through smashes and use cooldowns for impale, DPS parasite as hard as possible and use cooldowns as needed to live through its explosion, Stack up and use a cooldown to minimize Meteor impact then kill elementium meteor, DPS parasite as hard as possible and use cooldowns as needed to live through its explosion, Kill Corruption, Kill Regenerative Bloods, DPS body tentacle while also killing both sets of Blistering Tentacles. Cooldowns become critical on platform 4.

 

Phase 2 (Head)

This phase functions primarily the same except with much more damage going out and the addition of one very dangerous new ability. In normal and heroic Deathwing’s AoE damage pulses do more damage every time he hits a new 5% mark (e.g. 15%, 10%, and 5%). In heroic a swarm of healing bloods will be spawned in a random location on the edge of the platform each time he hits one of those 5% marks. These bloods can be snared but not rooted and make their way to Deathwing. If they reach him they heal him and are capable of bringing him back over the 5% increment you just got him below meaning that you’ll get another wave of healing bloods taking him down past it. For example if you take him to 14%, get a wave of bloods, and they heal him for 2% back up to 16% you’ll get another wave of bloods taking him down past 15% again. In theory if you don’t have enough AoE to handle these bloods you will be stuck in a loop forever and die. Make sure the bloods are slowed 100% of the time via rogue FoK spam, moonkin mushrooms, frost traps, blastwave, or whatever works best for you. If properly slowed you should have sufficient time to AoE them all (or enough of them) in time before they reach Deathwing.

For this phase we damaged Deathwing over the course of the first set of small adds and big adds down to 16%. Once the first set of big adds was dead we lusted and burned him through 15%, killed the healing bloods, and then burned him through the 10% transition as well killing off those bloods. We then cleared out small and big adds and worked through the 5% transition. It’s a bit daunting at first given the timing, damage, and dps needed but you’ll find you’ll make lots of progress with each attempt. Now that the 20% nerf is in effect for those that haven’t killed it yet I’m sure the threshold is a bit lower. The most frustrating part of this phase actually the fact you need to complete phase 1 to get here. That’s really it.

 

Healing:

Over the course of the four platforms this fight is not necessarily healing intensive from a moment to moment perspective (though there will be times people get low and close calls will happen) but it tends to be more of an exercise in mana management. You’ll find yourself having time to line up innervates with power torrents and mana tide/concentration potions will prove critical to keeping you well stocked.

Cooldowns:

Since you are not necessarily part of the cooldown rotation as a druid you can freely time your abilities such that they are available when you need them the most. My method may not necessarily be the best but it tended to serve me well enough. The way I went about it was the following:

Tree of Life on platform 1 purely for mana saving purposes

Tranquility on platform 2 when limb tentacle is low just to raid heal some on a budget

Tree of Life on platform 3 during first blistering tentacles to save mana

Tranquility on platform 4 just before elementium meteor if people are low from a crush, or just afterwards as required

Tree of Life on platform 4 on second blistering tentacles if needed, otherwise save for Phase 2

Tranquility and Tree of Life as needed in Phase 2 as raid damage increases

Corruption tentacle healing is actually fairly straight forward and does not really differ from your normal mode healing except in magnitude. Roll lifebloom on the relevant tank and actively rejuvenation spam on raid members to heal them up from tentacle crush damage. Wild Growth on cooldown and only if the raid isn’t fully topped off from the last crush. Don’t mindlessly spam it as mana can be a concern for your first kills. Swiftmend can almost always be used on cooldown with little to no overheal. This damage does not change in absolute magnitude but once the maximum HP buff is lost you will find it threatens your raid that much more. Exercise some caution in how much mana you spend on your rejuvenation spam, as you learn the encounter you may not be able to be as liberal as you’d like.

The corrupted parasite can be deadly but it’s only partially your responsibility. Swap to the afflicted person as soon as they get the debuff and make sure you have rejuvenation on them and swiftmend at the ready just in case. Provided they live until the Parasite spawns your only real concern in regards to the parasite is prehotting the raid if you think it’ll finish its cast. On platform four it more than likely will finish its casts so a raid cooldown coupled with aggressive hots is required to stabilize the raid. Again this isn’t anything more than you would normally do as part of your rotation, it is more a matter of conserving mana so you have it when you really need it.

The Elementium meteor is a non-issue until the fourth platform. On the first three platforms there is only some minor raid wide damage that goes out once it lands. On the last one however you have the impact to deal with. With something like power word barrier (or PWB and a Spirit link totem up) you can mostly trivialize the impact. The issue for us tended to be an unfortunate corruption crash into a bulk of the ranged just prior to the meteor landing. What I opted to do was pre-hot the raid like mad and pop a harmony infused tranquility a few seconds prior to the impact. This helped stabilize those that were low as tranquility front loads some of its healing tick wise and having the hot’s rolling improved the effectiveness of SLT.

Blistering tentacles aren’t necessarily any more deadly on heroic than normal if you actively mitigate them with some form of raid cooldown or healing throughput cooldown. Things like 4pT13 shaman spiritwalker’s grace or paladin cooldowns are great along with Tree of Life for you. There should never be a shortage of those around and provided DPS is on the mark (unfortunately that’s the gate item) you won’t find the blistering damage to be overwhelming. If they are up too long it will be but that is NOT your fault so don’t beat yourself up.

I can’t stress it enough that this fight is a marathon and not a sprint. Rejuvenation spam is incredibly strong here especially when the large corruption tentacle is keeping people from topped off so utilize your strengths. Mana management is the hardest part of this boss in my opinion as you need to give yourself as much as possible going into phase 2.

 

Phase two starts off a non-issue for healers and then gets progressively worse. Until Deathwing gets lower the only sources of significant damage are Shrapnel hits from the small adds which should be mitigated to less than lethal status via Dream usage and the tanks getting pummeled by the big adds. If DPS is on track, the small adds should only get one set of shrapnel off meaning you will have plenty of time to heal those people up, and the big adds will die before the tanks are unhealable. Yes you may lose tanks to this damage while learning the fight but be aware how much the difficulty of this phase scales with how trained your DPS is to kill tings fast and hold when they need to.

Once Deathwing starts increasing his raid wide damage to a noticeable level (10% marker and 5% marker) then the fight gets exponentially more difficult. Having people drop low from shrapnel or people potentially being low from AoE damage prior to taking a shrapnel hit becomes a much bigger problem. Similarly healers will be split between healing tanks and the raid so there is a greater risk of tank death if a heal is poorly timed. As a druid we shine when it comes to healing the raid wide damage through our standard tool set and maintaining lifebloom on the tanks in preparation for the worsening incoming damage. When first learning this fight the 5% mark was when the poop starting hitting the fan. I found myself popping tranquility, tree of life, and using direct heals much more liberally in order to save people who were dropping very low from the AoE pulses. Having the mana saved up to dig deep here at the end is pretty much your main focus throughout the rest of the encounter. There is no comparison between late phase 2 damage and any other moment in the fight.

I fear that I have not been entirely helpful here because honestly, as a druid, you aren’t really going to do anything different than your standard rotation. The fight’s difficulty scales with the strength of your healing core as a whole (strong dedicated tank healers, good synergized AoE healer group etc.) and not necessarily healer gear level. The fight’s difficulty does scale a lot with DPS gear level and skill level as many of the mechanics in the fight that need to be healed through are directly linked to how long they are alive: Corruption, Corrupted Parasite, Blistering Tentacles, Deathwing’s Limbs, Large adds in phase 2, and how much Deathwing heals with each set of healing adds. Each of those has the potential to suck MUCH more mana out of your healing core than required if allowed to live too long.

Conclusion:

I apologize if these guides aren’t as descriptive as they could be. This is more anecdotal advice as opposed to a solid “this is what you do” guide. I just want you to know how I approached these fights and hopefully that can help you even a little bit!

 

Personal update:

In the meantime I haven’t been playing WoW much at all. I log in for one night of raiding a week and don’t touch it for the rest of the week. This is why I haven’t had the gumption to post much of anything in a while. I assure you that I am not quitting or anything I have just taken this opportunity to try other games and do other things (like buy a house!). My current interests are finishing Kingdoms of Amalur, play lots of Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, try the Secret World beta, refinish my Star Control 2 playthrough, and possible dabble in a few other games in my pile of shame until other games I want to play come out. I will try to do more with the beta now that I am reinvigorated with updated level 90 talents.

Mid-week Musings – Planning Mists of Pandaria Keybindings

It has been fairly hectic for me these last couple of weeks and while I would have liked to write a Blackhorn or Spine of Deathwing primer I haven’t gotten around to it. I think I will be shortly though depending on availability. There has been a ton of news and at this point it is pretty much old hat to most of you but I will say that I am fairly excited about getting permanent tree form back in the coming expansion. I am one of those people who couldn’t care less about showing off my gear…heck I transmog it anyway so no one can see what I actually have on. This lets me get back to my roots so to speak and I enjoy that.

I was thinking about the coming expansion the other day and how I’m gaining four new button clicks to join my arsenal. While I really wish they’d use my lifebloom tank swapping suggestion there’s no way to know whether a new or unique ability will be created to handle this In the future. What I do know is that I will need to accommodate additional keybinds in my setup. I currently use an older Razer mouse so I do not have additional mouse buttons beyond 4 and 5 so you may have access to a deeper bind arsenal than I.

While away from WoW right this moment here is a rough draft of what my keybind situation is going to look like. I do not use mouse-over macros click to cast binds for heals with my mouse. The only one of those that I do use is Shift + Mouse 1 for cleansing.

I think it can definitely work though it will take a shift in my muscle memory as these will be new buttons for mushroom drop and detonate compared to what I have in my balance spec currently. This is probably the hardest part of updating buttons I have found as of late as everything has to be instinctive. I’m curious if anyone else has thought out their keybinds or planned for their Mists of Pandaria layout.

Heroic Ultraxion Primer (25m)

I’ve been meaning to post this mini-guide on Ultraxion for a long time given how fairly easy he is (execution wise, I know that DPS check wise he was tougher for some guilds pre-nerf). Now that the 10% nerf is live I really have no excuse for not having something up here. I’ll be posting a Blackhorn primer on the site this weekend if possible. My learning for that fight was during the 5% nerf however everything still applies.

 

Ultraxion Heroic Primer (25 man)

Our relevant class make-up:

Tanks: 2 of any type, we used druid and paladin

Healers: 5, we generally use one druid, two shamans, and either two priests one paladin or two paladins and one priest

DPS: 18, at least 9 players have some ability or cooldown that allows them to survive Hour of Twilight

The trick to this fight is adhering to mechanics and being accountable for your own survival from instant kill mechanics. As a healer you aren’t responsible for fading light or staying out and surviving Hour of Twilight making your job that much more simple. Hour of Twilight casts come at known intervals and have a three second cast time as opposed to the painfully slow normal mode one. If you are concerned about missing it you can always keep Ultraxion as your focus in order to watch his cast bar.

Outside of Hour of Twilight the only other major decision comes in the form of the three buffs available to you from the Dragon Aspects. They are unchanged from normal:

Red: Healing Increased by 100%

Green: Pulses a heal every second divided among raid members based on how much you healed in that time

Blue: Mana costs reduced by 75% and spell haste by 100%

While Green and Blue offer bonuses that are better for some healing classes than others they are not nearly as good as red is for restoration druids. Green just doesn’t put up the numbers you need and it isn’t a smart heal in any fashion. Blue makes a class already very mana efficient unnecessarily more mana efficient and increases spell haste when so many of our spells are instant or are GCD capped (rejuvenation). These facts coupled with the fact that the green and blue buff come so late make them less than ideal.

With the Red buff though you are getting an even bigger benefit than you’d think. Increasing all healing done by 100% is fantastic, but its interaction with Effloressence is even better. Under the benefit of this buff your swiftmend will heal for 200% of its normal value. This amount is then used to set your Effloressence tick amounts which are in turn also multiplied by two. This means Effloressence is healing for 400% of what it usually does AND it is a smart heal. If you have a feral druid available then your Effloressence can, by way of Nurturing Instinct, heal for 480% of its baseline value (a shaman with 15% increased healing nets you 460% of baseline). You will find Effloressence, if used properly, making up a substantial portion of your healing done for this fight.

Strategy:

As the fight is about to begin we had the healers activate Heroic Will roughly two seconds before Ultraxion lands and becomes attack-able. When he is, or just before, TimeLust is activated such that all DPS players get it but healers do not. This is NOT a requirement however and you could probably activate it at any time that works best for you if need be. We prefer doing it at the start in order for all player DPS cooldowns, trinket ICD’s, and pre-pots to line up perfectly. You also have the most time with everyone guaranteed to be alive and in the “normal realm” less.  TimeLust is activated again at the end of the fight to give healers the additional haste required to keep up with the heavy damage during Nozdormu’s Timeloop.  Any players that may have died during the fight will be able to benefit from this second TimeLust.

I tend to hold off on spending too much mana until the Red buff goes out. I will roll lifebloom, as painful as it is on a fight with fairly constantly tank swaps, and WG/Swiftmend on cooldown along with a modest smattering of Rejuvenation. Once the Red buff goes live however then I will go into my full AoE rotation using Innervate with Tier 13 set bonus, and Tree of Life as needed for longevity. Remember to place your Swiftmend on players with the 15 or 20 percent increased healing taken buff to maximize your throughput. The damage is going to be fairly slow at first and will ramp up to fairly severe around the 5 minute mark or so and continues to become more severe, then unhealable without a major cooldown, and then he berserks and kills everyone should you take too long. Rationing your mana usage is fairly important which means making every swiftmend and wild growth count. Tranquility can be used twice during this fight and one of those times will have to be during the endgame. To make sure it is available I would advise you to not use your first tranquility any later than the two minute mark.

There’s little that can be added beyond these few tips and “PRESS ALL THE BUTTONS” because that’s pretty much how you’re going to feel during the last couple of minutes in the fight. Once the blue buff is out it’ll feel like people are just getting topped off before your HoT’s can do much and then it escalates very quickly into ZOMG everyone is dying. My memories of learning this fight come from before all the nerf’s so it is probably much less painful these days but if you are just learning this fight be prepared to heal everyone and mash your buttons and GCD lock yourself. If you make good spell choices and aggressively and smartly use your healing abilities with short cooldowns you’ll find yourself putting up solid numbers (65K+ is easily attainable).

As stated I’d like to have a Blackhorn primer up this weekend and a Heroic spine primer up sometime in the next couple of weeks. I haven’t written as much other than these guides lately as I’ve been a little busy but I expect that I’ll do some more theory crafting and probably non-WoW related stuff as well in the coming weeks. I will also be at PAX East; if anyone else is going and wants to say hi feel free to let me know!

Spirit/Intellect Relationship 3, regeneration at high end gear levels

As my previous mana regen equation posts this will be a bit mathy but there are still some useful bits of information to take away from it even if you aren’t math inclined. I will try to keep this post a little shorter than my other ones as the basics have been covered already. The math herein is subject to some review when I am less sleepy or I receive feedback to the contrary.

ASSUMPTIONS (review)

What we know is that at any particular level of intellect adding more spirit gives us a constant amount of mana regen. I have tested this before and found that to be a factual statement. Same as before the value of intellect based regen is generated by using a ‘perfect world’ approximation of our innervate, replenishment, and revitalize mana returns and distributing them out over the course of a fight. My math assumes roughly a six to seven minute encounter for the purposes of valuing intellect regen. I do understand that longer fights will depreciate this regen somewhat.

EXPERIMENT

In order to generate a linear approximation of our mana regen relative to spirit and intellect, as opposed to the high order equation you may have seen elsewhere by theorycrafters, I evaluated my mana regen at multiple levels of intellect by way of buffs and the addition and subtraction of brilliant gems in my gear. This data was placed into a spreadsheet and a linear approximation was determined.

NOTE: this math was created for intellect ranging from 8344 to 9045 with mark of the wild active. The equation holds true higher than these values but the farther you push the less accurate it will be.

EQUATIONS:

Through experimental data the following linear interpretation of the spirit/intellect relationship at higher intellect levels should hold true:

Mana Regen (spirit) = ((.00008913)(Int)+.784)(Spirit)

This should be what pops up when you highlight “spirit” on your character sheet. It will read “Increases mana regeneration by X per 5 seconds while not casting”. In order to find your true mp/5 in combat simply divide the number by 2. In the meantime I will refer to Mana Regeneration as a stat, not true mp/5. For the purposes of these equations, when I refer to ‘Int’ I am referring to the number that shows up in your character screen WITH mark of the wild active. Intellect based regen remains unchanged.

Intellect regen = (Int+1180)*1.02

The overall effective regen equation then becomes:

Effective Regen = (Int+1180)*1.02 +  ((.00008913)(Int(buffed))+.784)(Spirit) +931

FURTHER USAGE

These days regeneration is less of a concern for us because we are eschewing spirit in favor of other stats with the swiftly increase levels of intellect available to us. You may not get a large amount of use out of them but they can still be used to tell you something about your overall longevity. The intellect regeneration scales fairly well with our gear and every 112.2 (modified) intellect increases our spirit’s regen by 1%.

In order to see what you are gaining when looking at new gear we need to add a couple more variables. Right now we have:

Int = intellect as listed on your character sheet with mark of the wild active

Sp = spirit as listed on your character sheet

We need to add the following:

I(delta) = the gain or loss of raw intellect, as it is written on the item’s or items’ tooltips (before leather mastery, furor, motw etc.) when comparing gear or gear sets

S(delta) = the gain or loss of spirit as it is written on the item’s or items’ tooltips

The final equation then becomes:

Effective Regen = ER = [((Int+1180)*1.02)+(I(delta)*1.22)]+[.00008913*(Int + (1.17*I(delta)))+.784](Sp+S(delta))+.931

Hope I haven’t lost you so far! There is a lot going on here but even the windows calculator can help you work through it in no time at all. If you’re looking at the effects of changing only one of the two stats at a time, I(delta) or S(delta) then its a lot easier to evaluate the change.

For I(delta) the following tells us the regen change per each point of raw intellect gained:

d(Effective regen)/I(delta)=1.22 + 0.000103(Spirit)

For S(delta) the following tells us the regen change per each point of raw spirit gained:

d(Effective regen)/S(delta)=(0.00008913(Int)+.784)

For my current gear, these two values would be 1.474 and 1.553 respectively. Given that intellect gives throughput puts it ahead in the end, but we knew that already.